"Senex" Featured in "Writing Raw"

My first novelette has been published online today, as the featured novelette on Writing Raw. While it’s not a paying market and mainly a space for new writers, I’m still pleased with it—it’s exposure, and it’s a publishing credit nonetheless. I’m glad to know that such spaces exist.

The novelette is “Senex”, and if you decide to wade through it (it’s about 10,000 words), I should probably give you some background first. I haven’t broadly advertised this publishing credit to my colleagues, because parts of this story are definitely erotic, maybe borderline pornographic. That has also made it harder to market—the length factor plus the sex factor rules it out for many literary publications. But it’s all necessary to the story, as far as I’m concerned.

The story isn’t erotic for the sake of being erotic. “Senex” is the Latin word for old man, and is actually a reference to the Jungian Senex archetype. For anyone who knows anything about the archetypes—the senex in the story is more of a “senex amans”, an old man who is married to a much younger woman, and hence behaves possessively. (Sometimes the senex amans is cuckolded as well, but that’s not relevant here).

The story is part of a short story collection I’m finishing up, that doesn’t have a title yet. The theme is the archetypes, and what is known as “archetype possession”. These are not pure illustrations of the Jungian types—they are stories about relationships that start out normally enough and become terrifying, or lead to psychological breakdown. Sometimes the relationship is husband/wife, sometimes father/son, sometimes father/daughter—or sister/brother. While not pure illustrations, knowing the Jungian type referred to in the title does help in understanding the story. The relationships between characters reveal deep-seated emotional troubles, troubles that didn’t manifest themselves before a particular event occurs.

I think I’ve said enough about it—if you would like to see the new story in Writing Raw, you can read it here:

Senex

Another story in this series, “Anima”, will be published by Dark Gothic Resurrected magazine in April 2010 (only 2 issues a year, and October 2009 is already filled). I would like to see most, if not all, stories in the series published, and later put them forward to a publisher as a collection. 2 more of them are currently being marketed, and hopefully I will have the good news that they are published soon as well. Between that and my December novel-finishing-agent-querying deadline, I should be giving up on sleep between now and 2010. Wish me luck.